1. Technical Field
This invention is directed to interactive display arrangements configured for use in telephone terminals and more particular to an arrangement for enabling a user to recognize and access features available on the telephone terminal.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Telephone terminals that contain user interactive displays and enable a user to access local and network-based features and also to execute local and network-based commands at the telephone terminal are now becoming popular. In these terminals, the number of features or commands available on a display for selection by the user is limited, at any given time, by the finite size of the display.
Most high function telephone terminals provide buttons and indicators for access to network-based features available from a telecommunication switch. Many of these telephone terminals also provide a display which further describes the feature or other available network-based information. Some telephone terminals also provide local features wherein access to a personal directory on a display or a repertory dialer may be provided, for example.
The technology presently in use in telephone displays is character-based liquid crystal device (LCD) displays. These displays are configured in various array sizes such as, for example, 2 line by 24 character LCD and 2 line by 40 character LCD. In order to be aesthetically pleasing when incorporated into the telephone housing, these displays tend to be small, typically on the order of one inch in height. Also, in order to provide a reasonable number of characters for information such as caller information and directory access information, a small font size for the characters is generally used.
Many interactive display arrangements available today permit accessing the features available on the display through softkeys. In order to provide a high level of functionally with a sufficient level of clarity in these displays, many softkey label screen prompts have heretofore been provided for accessing the available features. Often the most unambiguous softkey label for a particular screen prompt is not available for use in the display because the number of characters in the softkey label is incompatible with the limited character space available in the display for such label. This limitation has led to considerable effort being expended in the art for generating sufficiently descriptive truncated labels and at the same time have these labels fit within the allotted character spaces. This limitation has also resulted in some softkey labels being unduly cryptic for the average user of the telephone terminal and thus they tend to be confusing.
Softkey labels in prior art arrangements have had to fit into the number of character spaces generally above one softkey button. By way of example, a 2 line by 24 character display with four softkey buttons allows only four 5 character softkey labels. The remaining 4 character spaces are used for spacing between the softkey labels. In order to increase the number of character spaces for a softkey label, one arrangement available in the art uses the extra 1 character space available in a 2 line by 24 character display for one of the softkey labels thereby being able to use 6 characters rather than 5 characters for one of the softkey labels. Even though some improvement is available with this arrangement, many of the softkey labels are still too cryptic for the average user of the telephone terminal.
Although the softkey label screen prompts in the prior art provide a high level of functionality, they do not do so with the desired level of clarity for the average user of the telephone terminal. It is therefore desirable to provide softkey label screen prompts with a sufficient level of clarity which thereby permit a user of the telephone terminal to easily move about in a hierarchy of menu screens available on the display.